


Those Who Wait

by Tierfal



Series: Figments [3]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Dropping the L-Bomb, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-18
Updated: 2021-01-18
Packaged: 2021-03-16 22:19:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28838421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: Ed has known for a long damn time that cobbling things together out of necessity tends to work better than following a plan, but he hadn't expected it to apply tothis.
Relationships: Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
Series: Figments [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1954360
Comments: 26
Kudos: 334





	Those Who Wait

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, friends, I… forgot that I finished this. There has been… a lot… going on.
> 
> Including a very cool zine project that I'm helping to run! It's called Equivalent Exchange, and we're hoping to be able to include a lot of contributors from all parts of the fandom, so please check it out and tell your FMA friends! c: We're keeping the interest check open for a bit longer while we work on getting applications going, so please feel free to give that a look on [Tumblr](https://equivalentexchangeanthology.tumblr.com/) or at the [Carrd](http://equivalentexchangeanthology.carrd.co/). ♥
> 
> P.S. Just to state the obvious in so many words, this is a fanfic, and is not meant to be read as an authoritative commentary on therapists or therapy in any way. :') I just open documents and let words come out, honestly. Ed in particular refuses to listen to me when I say "I don't know if people are going to read that right." Please do me the service of enjoying this with several grains of salt if needed. OTL

Ed was not entirely sure that any of this was real. The sleep deprivation was part of it, but most of it was the _pleasantness_. Most of it was just how damn good this was.

He was lying on Roy’s couch, with his head resting on Roy’s lap and his feet propped up on the couch arm. The weather had taken a nasty turn, and a solid day of rain had wrought merry hell on the automail port; underneath the soft flannel blanket that Roy had turned up for him, he had a hot water bottle strapped to his thigh by way of a repurposed necktie. Roy had pulled the tie out of his closet at random; Ed had said “But isn’t that kinda nice?”, and Roy had said “I don’t care” and immediately put it to use to try to soothe a little of the ache.

On top of that, Ed had been up half of the prior night helping Al study for an exam—‘helping’, possibly, but he hoped that he’d done some good—and then had had to blunder his way through a day of work today. Lying here, dozing at intervals, warm and settled and well-fed and staggeringly content, with his head cushioned on Roy’s thigh, with his hair spilling over so that Roy could run the fingers of one hand through it while the other held up the audition monologue he’d been trying to memorize… there weren’t really words. If there had been, Ed wasn’t sure that he would have trusted them.

He was weirdly sort of elated that Roy had taken his suggestion about the theater thing, though. It might not pan out, but sometimes a leap of faith could put you a whole lot closer to where you wanted to be.

It could also drop you directly on the ground and break every bone in your body, but Ed had been making a concerted effort over the last couple of years to resist the urge to catastrophize at the slightest provocation. Besides, he was plenty good at breaking all of his bones all on his own, with no vaulting into the unknown required.

Roy’s fingers dragged through his hair, and his scalp tingled, and the throbbing around the port had calmed down a bit. This did not seem plausible.

Roy lowered the page to the couch on the far side from Ed and sighed. It wasn’t very dramatic, though. He still had work to do. “I can’t believe that you conned me like this.”

“I’m evil,” Ed mumbled at him. “Straight through. Hundred percent. Born bad. What’d I do?”

“I spend my entire day staring at paperwork,” Roy said, “and now you’ve got me sitting here in my spare time learning lines, and reading plays, and finding books about how to nail an audition, and—”

“You want theater books?” Ed asked. “’Cause I know this guy who works at a library. I bet he could hook you up.”

Roy scratched his fingernails very gently at the top of Ed’s skull, which just about made Ed’s eyes roll back into his head with how delicious it felt.

And then Roy said, “You’re missing the point, love.”

Ed’s eyes snapped open. His heart thumped in his chest so hard that it felt like it numbed the rest of him—like his extremities had turned to lead. He hadn’t misheard that.

Roy was staring right back down at him, and for a split-second—just that _instant_ —he looked shocked.

He hadn’t meant to say that.

He hadn’t even _said_ it, really—it had escaped him.

It wasn’t the specific words that it could have been. But in all the ways that mattered, it _was_.

Ed had heard the sheer warmth of it in the single syllable, and Roy’s reaction confirmed it. Roy’s hands had stilled completely. If it had _just_ been meant as a pet name, he wouldn’t have been surprised that it had slipped out. He wouldn’t have said it with such searingly matter-of-fact conviction.

Roy swallowed. His eyes darted towards the paper that he’d set down on the couch.

“I think,” Roy said, softly, “that you and I both know that I have more books already than I’ll ever read.”

“That’s quitter talk,” Ed said around the tangle in his throat. “You—still. Y’know. Tell me if you change your mind. A million actors that you’ve never heard of are more than ready to tell you how it’s done.”

“Thank you,” Roy said. “I’ll keep that in mind. I know a guy who knows a guy who’s talked to a librarian before. Maybe I can have him call that guy that you know.”

Ed made a face up at him. “This is exactly why you need to get into theater.”

  


* * *

  


Ed had been hoping that maybe his heart would slow down by the time that Roy joined him in the realm of all-consuming exhaustion. Despite the fact, though, that either it was an incredibly compelling audition monologue, or one of Roy’s books had suggested that he should sit on his couch late at night and stare at the individual letters of the words for ages, Ed was still wired as shit by the time they went to bed.

He felt…

He didn’t know what he felt. He felt too many fucking things to sort them out from each other. That was the thing. The repeated mental reminders that he was okay, and there wasn’t anything after him, were helping somewhat, but every couple minutes, his chest kept cinching inward until it was hard to breathe. Then it would gradually relax again, and it was fine.

…breathing was fine, anyway. _This_ wasn’t fine.

Ed squinted in the dark, trying to assess the distance from his— _his_?—side of the bed— _Roy’s_ bed—to the door. If he wanted to bail, he’d have to put his pants on first. Or he could just grab them on the way out. He’d left them in a crumpled pile on the floor. Roy had been kissing his forehead and saying something about breakfast tomorrow; pants hadn’t seemed important. His wallet was still in his pocket. His shoes were downstairs by the door, tipped over next to Roy’s. He’d been thinking that they looked bizarrely normal there. Comfortable, sort of.

It was dangerous to let yourself fit into someone else’s life. It was dangerous to let yourself get close; to let yourself mean something; to let yourself matter. That was how you hurt people. The fact that you weren’t doing it on purpose didn’t make it hurt them any less.

If Roy loved him, it was already too fucking late.

Ed’s stomach had knotted up—but not _tightly_. Loose enough that his insides could twist around each other like a nest of snakes.

He knew that he couldn’t get to thinking like that. He knew that he had to talk himself down; he knew that he had to talk to himself like he would have talked to Al. It was okay. It was going to be okay. Nobody had done anything wrong. People felt the things they felt; you could only control the way that you reacted to their feelings and your own.

What the hell _were_ his feelings, anyway? He needed to put aside the whole big muddle of feelings related to _Roy’s_ feelings for a second and figure out what _he_ felt. What he felt about Roy. Whether he… was that what it was? What was the difference? How did you _know_?

He wanted to lie on his back, but he’d settled on his side, and he didn’t want to make any noise and wake Roy up. It wasn’t Roy’s fault. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. Things happened. Things just _were_.

And Roy was just in love with him, apparently.

Damn it. He couldn’t help it; he squirmed around a little. The automail port still hurt like hell, and he’d cleverly laid down on that side, so that he could gaze dramatically in the direction of the door. Maybe he was the one who needed to take up theater.

Roy shifted. Ed tried to go still. Maybe Roy was just rolling over in his sleep. Maybe—

“Ed,” Roy said. 

Shit.

Roy took a deep breath. “What I… said. Earlier.”

_Fuck_.

Ed cringed into the dark. “It’s fine. I’m sorry.” He cringed harder. “Shit, I’m not just supposed to say that as a knee-jerk reaction to everything.” He twisted around enough to cringe towards Roy instead. “But I _am_. I’m sorry. It’s okay. Go back to sleep.”

The sheets rustled much more vigorously as Roy sat up, reached over, and turned on the light.

“Fuck,” Ed said, feeling his heart climb his throat. It wouldn’t have been as bad if the damn traitor of an organ didn’t sink ice picks and metal hooks deep into every last inch of his esophagus in order to make its ascent. “Shit. Sorry. It’s fine. We don’t have to talk about this right now.”

“We do if either of us wants to get any sleep tonight,” Roy said, but he said it with some forced cheer and an unforced smile, and that was a lot better than Ed had hoped for. “It’s really all right. Where shall we start?”

Ed looked at the lamp. Then he gave in and dragged himself upright. At least sitting up was a tiny but measurable fraction easier on the automail just now.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I should start,” Roy said, pushing a hand back through his hair. Some of his hair stuck up even after he lowered his hand. It was adorable. Ed’s whole chest felt like crumpled foil. “It’s my fault.”

“It’s not,” Ed said. “It’s—shit. It’s not anybody’s fault. Or it’s mine. I don’t know. This should be a good thing. I’m just—I don’t know. Is this… This whole relationship thing—this means it’s… ‘serious’. Doesn’t it?”

Roy watched him for a second, which made his skin crawl, but much less aggressively than any of the times before this. He wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or a bad one. Maybe he was getting used to it. Maybe it just felt less conspicuous because his heartbeat was so loud.

“It’s certainly starting to seem that way,” Roy said.

Great. _Fantastic_. What an incredibly noncommittal politician piece of phrasing. Roy needed to give up acting before he’d ever gotten into it and work on a book of meaningless acquiescences for career bullshitters instead.

Except—

Except that there was another possibility.

Except that it might not have been the politician in him that was mincing words.

It might have been the part of him that was terrified that Ed was going to panic and run.

It might have been the part that was tired and scared and lonely a lot of the time.

It might have been the part that had wanted to say _I love you_ for fuck knew how long and hadn’t dared because he’d thought it might push Ed directly out the door.

Or directly to this.

So Ed said, “Okay” instead of any of the other things that had leapt to his mouth a whole lot faster.

And then Ed took a deep breath, and scrubbed both hands up and down his face, missing the way that the metal had usually used to cool his skin if he was gentle with it.

And then Ed said, “I’ve just never done serious before.”

“That’s fine,” Roy said. He pulled his knees up to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. He had dorky flannel pajamas—mint green with a darker green trim. They were awful. Al had probably had the same pair when he was four. Roy was so fucking cute in them that it made Ed’s heart fill and his stomach turn. “What have you done before?”

Ed swallowed. “My therapist.”

Roy blinked at him, significantly less blearily than the last time. “…ah.”

“I mean,” Ed said, quickly, because he probably shouldn’t have come right out with that, and Naveed wasn’t here to defend himself, “he stopped seeing me as a patient as soon as we started seeing each other like… the other way. But it still got… a little… weird. I dunno.”

Roy smiled. Somehow. Wonders really did never cease. “I’ll… take that as a recommendation not to psychoanalyze you any more than strictly necessary.”

Ed grimaced back. “Gee. Thanks.”

Roy went quiet for a few seconds, drawing the blanket up over his knees and then nudging a fingertip at one of the folds of it.

“It’s not usually my style either,” he said.

“Serious?” Ed said. “Or therapists?”

“Both,” Roy said.

They looked at each other. Ed’s skin still felt… shivery. Insect-leggy. Ever so slightly ill-fitting. He was somebody that Roy Mustang loved. That wasn’t a state of existence that he’d ever expected to inhabit. It wasn’t a person that he’d ever thought he’d be.

Then again, he’d done a shit-lot of things that he never would have imagined on the path that had brought him here. Maybe that was all that life was sometimes—winding up someplace completely unfamiliar and making the goddamn best of it.

“What we have right now,” Roy said slowly, “is wonderful. I don’t want it to change. I don’t want you to change. And I don’t want you to feel… obligated. In any way. It’s…” He paused, drew a breath, let it out, and chafed his hand at his hair again. He looked like a disheveled hedgehog. Ed’s heart squeezed and squeezed until he thought he was going to pass the fuck out. “I got in a bit deeper than I expected a bit faster than I expected, but that doesn’t… it doesn’t have to affect anything. It’s really just putting a name on what I had already been feeling about you. I’m giving it away for free. You don’t have to do anything different. Please don’t do anything different.”

Ed swallowed as well as he could with his heart still writhing like a three-ring circus composed entirely of contortionists. “Nothing’s free.”

“Forgive my alchemical blasphemy,” Roy said, with an almost-convincing lightness this time, “but this is.”

Ed eyed him.

Roy eyed him back for a few seconds, but Ed knew that Roy would crack first.

Roy did. He shuffled his feet, rearranged the blanket on his knees, and sighed. But then he went right back to smiling.

“Think about it this way,” he said. “It’s… yes, it all sounds very dramatic, but what I’m feeling right now hardly even compares to what you feel about _everything_ in your life. All the time. I very much appreciate your company, and I very much appreciate your face, and I feel an extreme kind of fondness that occasionally makes me want to drown you in affection. I am halted by the fact that I would prefer not to have any of my fingers bitten off, since I use them for a lot of things, some of which you’ve already discovered and seemed to enjoy. I care about you a lot. You care about _everything_ a lot. So if you look at it in a relative way—”

“You’re downplaying it,” Ed said. “Half because you’re scared that it’s too big for me to handle after all, and half ’cause you’re scared that it’s too big for _you_.”

Roy eyed him again. This time it was much more convincing, because he was scowling to go with it.

“I believe you now,” Roy said.

Ed had a weird fraction of an impulse to laugh. “About dating the therapist?”

“It sounded plausible,” Roy said, “but I wasn’t entirely sure.”

It was Ed’s turn again for continued eyeing of boyfriend specimens. “Huh. That’s kinda how I’m feeling about what you just said.”

Roy went back to sighing and shoving his hands through his hair again. He was, admittedly, very good at both. “Unfortunately, that’s fair. Just… it’s not… the reason that I didn’t say anything before was that it just… it never seemed necessary. There’s never been anything missing. It’s all felt very… natural, from the very beginning. Being with you is… easy. I didn’t realize that that was _possible_.”

“I’ll show you ‘easy’,” Ed muttered, because he had to.

“Please,” Roy said. “Any time you like. Almost any place.” He paused, and the eyeing had taken on a much more perceptive character, which Ed suspected that he did not like. “Are you mad at me?”

“What?” Ed said. His heart was apparently not done with acrobatics for the night, since it skipped a bit and then flipped and then did something that felt like hula-hooping for a while. “No. Why the fuck would I be mad at you? You should be mad at _me_ for waking you up.”

“You didn’t,” Roy said. “I wasn’t sleeping.”

“Then you should be even more mad,” Ed said, clenching and unclenching his hands underneath the sheet. Knowing Roy, he’d notice the way that the tendons in Ed’s arms were flexing, figure it out, and correctly interpret it as an attempt to release the tension, but it was still worth doing. “If I’d been a normal fucking person who could react to that in a normal fucking way—”

“You did react in a normal way,” Roy said. He’d tilted his head. _Adorable_. Ed hated that; it made him feel wobbly in an existential way. “I won’t insult you with any protests about the first part, but it’s… I can hardly think of anything more normal than reacting to an ambush with surprise.”

“So you admit that it was an ambush,” Ed said.

“I’ll have to get the dictionary,” Roy said, wrinkling his nose. “I’m not sure if it qualifies as an ambush if it was an accident.”

“Dictionaries are the one book I hate,” Ed said. “Words are much more interesting when you make ’em up.”

Roy was smiling at him again. “I can’t argue with that.”

“Ah, shit,” Ed said. “That explains it. You’re _sick_. Do you have a fever? You should lie down.”

“Agreed again,” Roy said. Was he _dying_? “But first, let me try one more angle.”

“You’re in government,” Ed said. “You have six million ‘one more angle’s.”

“Ordinarily, yes,” Roy said, eyes softened by the smile again and again— “But right now I want you to be able to get some sleep, so I promise it’s just the one. Consider it this way: I feel this way about you because of what you’re already doing—because of everything that you’ve done up until now. It’s a reflection of the status quo. I don’t _want_ to ask you for anything, or for more, or for a new name for what we’ve got, because I don’t want anything else. Everything is _good_ , Ed. What you feel already is part of this, and this is working for us. You don’t have to do anything different. You don’t have to feel anything different. You don’t have to re-title it to try to make me feel better. I feel great. I’m happy. This is already so much more than enough.”

Ed knuckled at his eyes. It… made sense. Mostly it made sense. What Roy was presenting was logical enough that Ed’s brain sort of nodded to itself and raised its eyebrows at him.

His heart was just such a fucking _mess_.

“Yeah,” he said, lowering his hands and giving in to the urge to look at them. Curl his fingers in tight. Wonder how the hell he’d wound up here. “Happy people are notorious for sittin’ up in bed late at night on a Friday, trying to apologize for being normal and well-adjusted and caring about their boyfriends.”

“Hey,” Roy said. “By your own admission, ‘happy’ gets to mean whatever I want.”

Ed stared at him.

“Also,” Roy said before Ed could wrangle any of his disbelief and/or fury anywhere near a coherent sentence, “I have never been normal or well-adjusted for a single day of my life. But since I’m not sure that I’d have a boyfriend to care about if I had been—for the moment, I’ve made my peace with it. How’s that?”

“You don’t get to change ‘happy’,” Ed said, albeit slightly faintly. “Everybody knows that one.”

“If we’re getting rid of the dictionary,” Roy said, sounding strangely calm for someone who everyone _knew_ ate the damn things for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midnight snacks, “then let’s pitch the whole thing. ‘Love’ already means something completely unique to everyone. Why don’t we—”

“ _Mustang_ ,” Ed said. “You can’t just—you can’t make words stop having meaning. You sure as hell can’t stop them from having an _effect_.”

“If the effect is them bothering you so much that it’s keeping you up half the night,” Roy said serenely, “then I intend to try.”

Ed dropped his head into his hands. “Roy. You can’t… you can’t fight _language_.”

The calmness with which Roy said, “Watch me” made Ed think…

Well, it made him think of himself.

That seemed extremely unfair.

“Fine,” he said. “Do you mind if we fight it in the morning?”

He peeked through his fingers, and Roy’s expression made it very evident that he understood the tactic. Ed hadn’t exactly figured that he’d get away with ham-handed attempts at subterfuge in front of a world expert, but at least Roy looked sort of fond instead of condescending.

“Of course,” Roy said.

Then he leaned in, hand stroking lightly over Ed’s hair for a second before cupping his head to steady it as Roy kissed just above his ear.

“Goodnight, Ed,” he said, reaching for the light again.

“For real this time,” Ed said.

Roy and his stupid pajamas and his stupid bed and his stupid smile, lit all in soft yellow until he turned the switch and plunged them back into darkness. “For real this time.”

Ed had been able to tell from that smile that Roy knew that the conversation wasn’t really over yet. Roy probably even recognized that the reason for that was that Ed still had to sort out a lot of little bit and scraps of feelings in his head before they could pick up where they’d left off.

Roy listened to him. Roy _respected_ him. And Roy cared about him, in a bones-guts-brain way, with a touch of ferocity, that rang extremely true in Ed’s version of the universe.

Naveed had cared about him, too—a lot. He’d figured that part out, even though the caring hadn’t looked quite like any kind that he was used to.

But Naveed had invested in him first and foremost because Naveed had found him _interesting_.

It hadn’t been a bad thing. There hadn’t been anything cruel about it. And the whole deal had ended pretty amicably, all things considered, but it was… it had complicated things in Ed’s head a little. Naveed had been the one who had equipped him to pick that apart as it was happening, but _understanding_ his brain’s self-destructive tendencies didn’t necessarily make them easier to circumvent.

Naveed had probably loved him, too, in a Naveed sort of way; or something close to it. But even when they’d ended the professional part of it, Naveed had still seen him more as a series of interconnected complexes than as a complicated human being. Not as a person who was fighting their own impulses every other minute, desperately trying to spackle over all the cracks, searching endlessly for a jagged-edged place in the world that he could drop down into and _fit_.

Roy had pulled the rug right out from under him, and he’d landed in one that felt like it had been carved out for him inch by inch.

Roy was fascinated by him, too, but in a different way. Roy knew a lot of interesting people, and Roy would probably have said that that was a _very_ bad thing, and that interesting people were the reason that he couldn’t sleep most nights.

But Ed knew all of the people that Roy was, and had been, devoted to. Ed knew that their intelligence and their interestingness _mattered_ , yes, but that what Roy loved them for was their compassion. Roy loved them most for the thing that he thought that he didn’t have.

That raised a possibility: Roy might not _stop_ loving him when Roy ran out of interesting things to learn about his psyche, or interesting ways to pick his brain, or interesting things to talk about.

Roy might not ever stop.

Ed was still wrapping his head around the idea of there being a _rest of his life_ to contend with. He was still figuring out what he wanted to do with all the years that might lie ahead—what to put in them, which doors to open, how to pass such an immense amount of time. Looking after Al had helped to occupy him for a long while, but Al was so cheerfully self-sufficient now that Ed was trying to teach himself how not to hover. In concept, so far, he sure _liked_ the idea of spending some—maybe a lot—of that time with Roy.

He’d enjoyed pretty much all of the time that he’d spent with Roy so far, up until the part tonight where it felt like he’d been hit by a train, which had flung him into a ditch, where a moose had sat down on him.

But maybe… maybe that was the only thing that he had to decide right now. Maybe that was the only thing that he really had to put his finger on, when you got right down to it. If the question was _“Are you looking forward to waking up next to that weirdo tomorrow morning?”_ , the answer was utterly, definitively, undeniably _“Yes”_.

He didn’t really have to worry about any of the other tomorrows just yet.

  


* * *

  


When Ed woke up the next morning, it was still raining. At least if the whole city was underwater by the end of next week, he’d probably have bigger problems than the deeply-throbbing, bone-twingeing vengeance of his leg. That was what had woken him in the first place, though. It was all very circular. Most things were.

Roy’s side of the bed—Roy’s side of _Roy’s_ bed—was empty. He’d left the blankets pushed down; he’d left an impression in the mattress and a dent in the pillow and a little nest of rumpled sheets. Ed reached over and flattened a hand in the middle of it. Cool by now, which was… interesting. Slightly unsettling. Roy really liked to sleep in on Saturdays.

Ed dragged himself to his feet and went to Roy’s wardrobe and dug up the same military academy sweatshirt that he usually stole. He had no idea how old it was. Given how much of the surprisingly soft lining it had retained, he had a couple theories: one was that it had never come from the military academy in the first place, and someone else had gotten it for Roy as a gift; one was that ‘standard issue’ had meant something nicer back in the day, and it was just that Roy had never, ever worn the thing. It didn’t matter much. It was just cozy enough to pair with his boxers for slightly chilly mornings like this on the way to coffee, and he probably looked ‘cute’ and ‘domestic’ or some shit. And it smelled like Roy because of its proximity to Roy’s other clothes. Ed didn’t even usually have to dig for it anymore; once Roy had seen him wear it, it had started to reside much closer to the top of the drawer. That was a positive sign, right?

Ed needed to look for those. He needed to focus on them.

He felt groggy and muggy and muzzy and possibly gruzzy, given the linguistic pattern at work, so he grabbed onto the banister tightly when he reached the stairs. Positive signs. Sometimes you had to seize them by the neck and hang on with all your might.

He stumped down the stairs as quietly as he could just in case Roy had streaked out of bed at the crack of dawn to get some serious monologue work done or something. Or regular work. Roy had been known to do bizarre shit like that sometimes. He’d been known to…

Well, he’d never been known to kneel down on his kitchen floor in front of a small pile of assorted objects, but that was certainly what he was doing when Ed stepped into the kitchen, so evidently the list could use some work.

“No, don’t look,” Roy said, waving a hand at him without looking up. “Good morning. I can’t do alchemy in front of you; I haven’t practiced.”

Ed had, of course, completely ignored both the verbal imperative in that sentence and the accompanying gesture: he walked over and looked down at Roy’s collection of oddities. They weren’t _so_ odd: Roy had found two large hot water bottles, which made Ed’s leg ache in envy; and a long scrap of fleece with uneven edges that implied its having been scavenged from a jacket; and a small black strap and one of those parachute buckles.

“Please at least cover your eyes,” Roy said, sitting back on his heels and smiling like a man who was not especially traumatized by the conversation they’d had the night before. “I’ll be too embarrassed.”

Ed hadn’t had a drop of coffee, and this whole situation had caught him… well, wrong-footed; and he was simply so bewildered at this point that he wordlessly did as he was told.

He was going to have to mention that to Al. This had to be a first.

A bit of rustling preceded a bit of tapping, which preceded a crackle of energy that _still_ shivered straight through his blood. No prisoners. He was always going to miss that more than he’d ever missed the arm.

And it was always going to be worth it.

He opened his eyes.

The alchemy had been more superficial than structural, but Roy had done cleaner work than he’d led Ed to believe he would—he’d merged the two water bottles together into one long tube, with the strapping fused directly to the rubber on either end; and the fleece had become an inside lining. He had to have done something clever with the chemical components of one of the pieces to seal everything together so neatly. Good for him.

Roy had also set aside a measuring cup full of steaming water, which he poured into his new masterpiece. He checked for leaks. He half-nodded. His hair still looked all ruffled and fluffy, and there was something about the vulnerability of _Roy_ being willing to look stupid in front of another person first thing in the morning that made Ed’s guts flip.

Ed’s pre-coffee bad-sleep brain didn’t manage to process any of his recent observations until Roy lifted up the contraption and wrapped it around Ed’s leg, right where the automail port joined with his thigh.

Roy buckled it on and sat back for a second, assessing it.

“Oh,” Ed said. He was also assessing it. It was warm and soft all the way around. It felt fucking amazing. “ _Oh_.”

Roy’s hands rose to it and started shifting across it, making several little meaningless-tug adjustments. “Hmm. It’s a little bulkier than I expected. Will you be able to walk all right? I don’t imagine that you’d want to take it hiking, or anything, but if it would be too annoying to wear around the house, then—”

Ed was looking down at the top of Roy Mustang’s head as Roy rambled about how maybe he should do another layer of fleece on the outside to insulate it better and protect the other leg from burns. Roy pulled on the strap a little more as he talked, and then patted the top, and…

“I love you,” Ed said.

Roy went still. He looked up—guarded this time. Cautious. Held-back.

“Ed,” he said, very quietly. His smile _almost_ touched his eyes. “It’s all right. You don’t have t—”

“I’m not,” Ed said. “I mean it.” He gestured down. “Look what you just fucking did. You got up early on a damn Saturday to try to make me feel better. How much of the time last night when you were pretending to study that monologue were you actually thinking about how you were gonna jury-rig this for me?”

The smile softened just a little bit.

“I’m serious,” Ed said. The warmth seeping into his muscle felt like it was patting all of his individual nerves on the head and soothing them to sleep. “This is who you _are_. And I love that. And I love you. So deal with it.”

The smile had reached Roy’s eyes now—constellatory. Was that a word? Ed was going to make it one. He’d moved mountains; he could sure as hell rename the sky to try to make it measure up to Roy.

“Well,” Roy said, softly, starting to stand, “in that c—”

He froze, barely up on one knee, and grimaced, holding a hand to the small of his back.

Ed still had not had any coffee. He wasn’t sure if he should put a hand on Roy’s shoulder or call for an ambulance. “Are you okay?”

“I regret to report,” Roy said, gritting his teeth, “that aging is bullshit.”

“Yeah,” Ed said. At least that was a good cue to offer Roy both hands and try to help ease him upright. “At least we can be decrepit together.”

Roy was smiling more than that merited as he stood. Ed had a weird feeling that he should get used to it. Roy had kept one hand on his back this whole time, though, so Ed couldn’t spare too much focus for bizarre little premonition-y shit.

“That,” Roy was saying, “is not a bad consolation prize.”

“Good,” Ed said. “It’s the only one I’ve got.” When he was sure that Roy could walk, whether or not the back thing persisted, he carefully let go. “Okay. Now I’m gonna make you breakfast.”

Roy blinked. Ed looked like a beached fish with bug eyes when he was startled. Roy looked like a fucking magazine ad. That figured. “What? You don’t have to do that. We could just go out. Why—”

“Because I love you,” Ed said. Roy’s eyes widened substantially, but he was still _firmly_ on the magazine side, and nowhere near the fish. Damn it. “And because it’s morning. And because I’m hungry. Seems like the perfect trifecta of reasons to make breakfast.”

Roy continued blinking. He continued to do it beautifully. His hair was a mess, though. It was a magazine-worthy mess, but it was probably going to be marginally painful combing it out. One straw to grasp at was better than no damn straws at all. Ed ducked down to get a pan for bacon so that Roy wouldn’t realize that he was gloating over a single straw-grasp, although Roy still looked confused enough that he might not have noticed. “I… that… makes more sense than I’d like it to. Shall I get the coffee on in the meantime?”

“Now I love you even more,” Ed said.

Roy said “Oh, dear” under his breath, but since he was already opening the giant jar full of coffee beans, Ed still considered it a win.

  


* * *

  


Breakfast was great. It occurred to Ed—pretty late, considering, but the coffee was gradually revitalizing all of the neurons that the shitty sleep and shittier overthinking had beaten to a pulp—that part of Roy’s surprise had probably been rooted in the fact that Ed didn’t usually stay very long on Saturdays. Normally they both slept in for a long time, because normally they’d been up late doing stuff that didn’t involve much thinking at all, and then they sometimes did more non-thinking-related stuff in the morning, followed by brunch at the nice café a couple blocks down, and then Ed stole a book or three and went home.

It wasn’t that he didn’t _want_ to stay, exactly. It was just that he always felt like he’d monopolized a lot of Roy’s time by then, and he didn’t want to take up too much more of it. He always wanted to go check in on Al, too, but very little of that checking had been necessary in the past year or so, and Al still always gave him the beatific _My patience for you will never run thin because you do it out of love even when ‘it’ is obnoxious_ smile, but… mostly it was that Roy had a life, and Ed didn’t want to impose himself on it or invite himself into it or assume that Roy _wanted_ him in it more. The Friday night thing worked, and it was great. Why reach for more at the risk of screwing that up?

He knew damn well why.

Apparently Roy knew, too.

He didn’t have to worry about that yet, either. He could just sit here and enjoy breakfast—and he could enjoy it all the more easily with an alchemically-enhanced hot water bottle contraption strapped to his leg.

Roy sipped his coffee in silence for a little while, but of course that wasn’t destined to last.

“So,” Roy said. “What was it like dating your therapist?”

“Ex-therapist,” Ed said. He’d automatically picked up the fork in his left hand, which wasn’t that uncommon when he was too distracted to remember the option of the other one. The right was a little tingly today. He was thinking about switching hands to try to get the little bits of egg that had escaped towards the edges of his plate, though. “I dunno. It was okay.” He gave Roy a meaningful look. “He talked a lot.”

Roy put his elbow on the table and his chin on his hand, beaming. “And how did you _feel_ about that?”

Ed stared at him for a second and then pointed down at his plate. “You’re lucky this is too good to waste on your hair. I take back every nice thing I ever said about you.”

Roy beamed wider. “Both of them?”

Ed pointed the fork at him. “Now you’re gettin’ it.”

Roy laughed. It was the bright one. Ed wished the eggs weren’t so good. Maybe next week he’d make bad breakfast on purpose, and then he could upend the plate on Roy’s head.

There were probably combinations of food and Roy that would be more fun for longer, though, now that he was thinking about it.

“Couldn’t help myself,” Roy said, as if he’d ever once struggled with impulse control in the entire course of his meticulously-plotting little life.

Ed moved the fork to the right hand after all. Part of the trouble was that you couldn’t _see_ anything wrong with it; sometimes the idiosyncratic nerve interactions reduced his grip strength, but everything always looked normal enough. His fingertips had settled naturally on the handle of the fork, but something just felt… off.

He couldn’t stop it, so he was trying to let it go. At least he had another hand to work with when he needed it.

“The therapist part was really good,” he said, because it was the truth; and if he couldn’t put eggs in Roy’s hair, at least he could put quite a lot of surprise on Roy’s face. “Like, it doesn’t _fix_ anything—it doesn’t make stuff go away—but it’s sort of like alchemy in reverse. It gives you tools to start dismantling the shit that you think or feel that you don’t completely understand—because you got trained into it young, or by experience, without even noticing. And sometimes when you can identify what it is and where it came from, it’s a little easier to slow yourself down and think it over if you’re starting to do one of those things. If you can figure out where the pipe’s broken and what broke it, the pipe’s not gonna magically seal itself back up, but at least you’re not just patching blind and hoping for the best anymore.”

Roy was watching him very closely, surprise notwithstanding. “You… It struck me, at the wedding, that you seemed very… settled. More than I’d expected.”

Ed tried twirling the fork around his right-hand fingers, to mixed results. “Like I said with the drawing, y’know—there’s fuck-all else to do out there except think a lot and mend fences and stare at the sky. I needed _some_ kind of a direction. Started picking fights with everybody about everything after a while, and it was making all of us really upset, and I realized after a bit that I was just going to slow down Al’s recovery if I was ragging on him all the time, and… I figured out that I had to pick something to work on. Eventually decided that it might as well be me.”

He hadn’t done it for himself, though. That was one of the first things they’d talked about. He’d done it for Al. He’d signed up for self-improvement not because he wanted to, not because he thought that it would make him feel better, but because he’d wanted to _be_ better—a better brother to Al, a better part of their household. He’d done it because he’d wanted to get his shit battened down and tucked away, so that he could support other people. He’d done it because he’d wanted to be useful, not because he’d wanted to be happy.

Naveed had drawn that out of him over the course of two of the longest and most excruciating hours of his entire life, which was really saying something given that impalement, human transmutation backlash, and automail surgery all featured on that list. Honestly, Ed had probably loved him a little after that first fucking session—after how infuriatingly calm he was, with cool steel underneath it. After the way that he refused to back down no matter how many times Ed deflected or defended or snapped back, because he knew that they were making progress, and that growing had to hurt. Because it hurt the most at the beginning, and then you _got_ somewhere.

Roy was watching him again. Picking at the remnants of his eggs would have been obvious, so he tried to sit very still.

“It helped you,” Roy said eventually. “I think anyone could see that much. It’s hard to think of a higher recommendation than that.”

“I’m not telling you to go,” Ed said. The tiniest flicker of relief crossing Roy’s face confirmed that hunch. “I mean, if you ever _wanted_ to, I’d totally support it. It’s like… you know when you explain some science theory to someone, and trying to get them to understand it from the outside always helps you figure something out about it? Trying to find a way to express shit to a neutral third party always changes the way that you look at what you already know.”

Roy was still watching him. Roy seemed to remember that he had a mug of coffee in his hand, and that people who weren’t on-edge about this whole topic would be idly continuing to drink from it. He raised it again.

“I don’t think you need it in the same way I did,” Ed said. “Maybe ‘do’. Whatever. Or you don’t for the same reasons. I’m willing to bet that you already think about people as complicated input-output machines. You already spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the previous dominos looked like before they fell, so that you understand which ones are likely to be tipping over today. That’s your whole… thing. You need to trace people’s actions backwards to their motives so that you can predict what they’ll do next. And I’m also willing to bet that you do that for yourself, too, not least ’cause you need to know what _they_ can predict about _you_.”

Roy was smiling very wryly over the rim of the coffee mug now. “I always lived in fear of the day that you applied your logical facilities to other human beings. It’s comforting to know that at least I was justified.”

Ed made a face at him, but he was kind of right. It wasn’t really _Ed’s_ fault—slow days at the library were an absolute nightmare when you knew so many interesting people and had the time to turn them over.

“Well,” he said, “whatever. Give me a couple minutes, and I’m sure I can find a way to interpret that as a compliment. Maybe. I think what you need more than the talking-through-your-own-feelings part is… someone who’ll just sit with you and remind you that what you’re doing matters, and you’re on the right track.”

Roy’s smile changed again. He had a million of them—he always had. Ed was seeing a completely different selection of them these days, though, and he’d be lying if he said it didn’t make his stupid heart skip.

This one was aiming for arch, but it had come out a little bit fragile and a little bit sweet.

“Goodness,” Roy said. “Are you volunteering?”

“ _Duh_ ,” Ed said.

Roy put his coffee mug back down on the table. He turned it around a couple times. He cleared his throat.

“Oh,” he said. “I—”

“I warned you,” Ed said, shoving his chair back to stand. “I love you, and now you have to deal with it. Tough shit.” He started over for the counter and the jar. “Do you want more coffee?”

Roy was trying to hide a grin behind his mug this time, but he was doing a lousy job. “Yes,” he said. “Perpetually. Thank you.”

“Good answer,” Ed said.


End file.
